Sex and smiles for VDay

(Everyday mansex — just your ordinary fellatio — discussed in plain language, mostly analytically rather than enthusiastically, so maybe not enough to frighten the horses in the street. Use your judgment.)

The Michael Lucas studio ad for a Valentine’s Day offer, cropped here for the sake of modesty (the full image, of happy cocksucking, can be viewed on AZBlogX):

When the Old Porn Peddler comes on a holiday, he naturally turns to puns. For Valentine’s Day, it’s probably going to involve heart and hard-on, as here.

Commentary: on the heart/hard pun for VDay; on the figure of the Old Porn Peddler; on the smiles by both cocksman and cocksucker (even though the latter has his mouth filled by a big dick); and on what the men are doing with their hands.

The heart/hard pun. Earlier on this blog (again, with X-rated images on AZBlogX):

for Fathers Day in 2015, “My hard-on belongs to Daddy” (with Daddy/Boy sex)

The Old Porn Peddler. My play on that legendary figure, the Old Dope Peddler. From Wikipedia:

“The Old Dope Peddler” is a satirical song by Tom Lehrer. It was on Lehrer’s first album, Songs by Tom Lehrer from 1953, and a new live recording on Tom Lehrer Revisited in 1960.
The song is a parody of a popular tune well known at the time, “The Old Lamp-Lighter” by Charles Tobias and Nat Simon, which was a hit first for Kay Kyser in 1947, and continued to have popular new recordings to 1960. The sticky-sweet verses of the original asserted that

He made the night a little brighter
Wherever he would go
The old lamplighter
Of long, long ago

It goes on to say that if there were sweethearts in the dark, “he’d pass the light and leave it dark,” and concludes by explaining that now, the old lamplighter turns the stars on at night and turns them off at dawn.
Lehrer’s parody switches the song’s protagonist to “the Old Dope Peddler” selling “powdered happiness”. It has lines like this:

He gives the kids free samples
because he knows full well
that today’s young, innocent faces
will be tomorrow’s clientele

In the case at hand:

He gives the guy great blowjobs
because he long ago learned
that that young, horny cocksman
will soon blow him in return

Smiling through the sex. In the ad, both cocksman and cocksucker are smiling happily: hey, buddy, this is awesome!

(Personal tastes: I love to see men kissing. And I love to see men smiling, especially when they’re enjoying mansex, as above.)

Easy for the cocksman, something of a trick for the cocksucker, who’s got his mouth filled with cock. But he can still smile with his eyes, crinkling them up. From a 10/13/15 posting of mine:

In this photo, [actor Jordi] Vilasuso isn’t quite smiling with his mouth, but he’s definitely “smiling with his eyes” — appparently known as smizing in some circles. The verb smize is of course a portmanteau of smile and eyes

Note that both men are smiling at us, for us, the viewers. But they’re connecting with each other, and not just through that cock.

What the hands say. The connections are through their hands, on each other’s bodies: cocksucker with a fist wrapped around the base of the cocksman’s balls (giving his guy an extra measure of pleasure, beyond the action on his cock), cocksman with an affectionate hand on the cocksucker’s head.

The hand on head can be a gesture of dominance and control, forcing the cocksucker down on that cock. But very often it’s a sweet, affectionate gesture, a way for the cocksman to connect with the guy serving his dick, maybe as an embrace, maybe as a kind of sexual counterpart to a buddy pat. You don’t just offer your hard dick to a guy and expect him to get down to work on it, you hold him affectionately, support him.

Screenshots and stills: know your audience. All of this makes the ad quite pleasing, and it doesn’t hurt that both participants are good-looking young men with hot bodies. I don’t know who the actors are, or what porn flick this photo was originally advertising, but I’m quite sure it’s not a screenshot from a video, but a posed still shot. It’s almost a sure thing that nothing like this scene appears in the video.

Ads for porn flicks often show wonderfully smiling actors, when it turns out that in the actual videos no one smiles at all during sex: the actors are intently focused on performing the sex, on being competent men-at-work, and their characters are fully absorbed in their sexwork. (When this happens, I tend to feel cheated, because I really like those smiles.) And in the videos, the actors don’t gaze at the camera (that is, at us fags viewing the videos) — or, at least, they’re not supposed to, because that would break the third wall and break the viewers’ identification with the characters in the scene, which is what drives the viewers’ sexual arousal.

So: the image above is great as an ad, but would be terrible as a moment from a porn flick. The ads are directed at potential buyers, the videos are directed at fags jacking off.